A Cross-linguistic Approach to the Syntax of Subjunctive Mood

This work explores the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across multiple languages, including a detailed analysis in A Cross-linguistic Approach to the Syntax of Subjunctive Mood.

This monograph provides a comprehensive examination of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across various languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian. By closely analyzing the contexts in which subjunctive mood appears and its semantic implications, the book introduces a feature-based framework that highlights the shared characteristics of verbs that embed subjunctive mood. It also considers the variations in subjunctive-related complementizers across different languages.

Two primary proposals emerge from this detailed analysis. First, the lexical semantics of the main clause predicate significantly influences mood selection. Specifically, the emotive property associated with the external argument of the embedding verb, typically the subject, plays a crucial role in regulating subjunctive mood. The book further proposes a nanosyntactic analysis of the internal structure of embedding verbs that enhances our understanding of this relationship.

Second, the work addresses cross- and intra-linguistic variations through distinct patterns of lexicalization. These variations depend on which aspects of the verb's and complementizer's functional sequences are lexicalized and how they are structured by different languages. By adopting this innovative feature-based perspective, A Cross-linguistic Approach to the Syntax of Subjunctive Mood offers a unified framework for understanding embedded subjunctives, supported by extensive empirical data from both well-studied and less-explored languages.